I'm a libertarian lawyer and college professor. I blog on religion, history, constitutional law, government policy, philosophy, sexuality, and the American Founding. Everything is fair game though. Over the years, I've been involved in numerous group blogs that come and go. This blog archives almost everything I write.
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Thursday, May 05, 2016

Bonnie Kristian on Trump and American Civil Religion

... How is this happening? How is the heir of the Moral Majority endorsing a twice-divorced former strip club owner? How is Trump so appealing to what is supposed to be a Christian nation?And it is in precisely that last phrase—“Christian nation”—the answer may be found: America’s entrenched, pseudo-Christian civil religion
is the primary culprit here. President Trump is the due result of our
theologically vacant imperial cult, which in the guise of orthodoxy
worships only the power of the state.

[...]

... This sort of ultimatum is right at home
in a civil religion that facilitates unthinking Christian loyalty to the
state by means of a clever syncretism: If America is “under God”—if the
United States becomes the “city on a hill”—we
needn’t worry about obeying God rather than men. It’s all one and the
same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph is idolatrously mutated
into an American tribal deity.